Leadership and revolution

I23

...a belief in intrinsic spontaneity of the masses to be revolutionary without hard, slogging leadership….[is a] disease...

Hope and fear for the future

I10

I draw a lot of my inspiration, especially when it comes to environmental activism, from the compassion that I have for the planet, from the emotional connection that I've built to the earth through many excursions, and wilderness trips, and exploring in nature, and the huge amount of appreciation I have for the world around me. So yeah, compassion, that is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from and also a little bit of fear and anger as well....Fear for the future. If nobody does anything then what is our future going to look like?

The politics of fear

I22

When people are insecure, when people think there is instability, and they feel atomized like we feel in this society, then anybody who can guarantee security and stability will receive their support, including the far right. Even intelligent people who you would think would have left wing positions would adopt that because when it comes to insecurity and stability...people want to opt for security and stability.

Indigenous struggles and deep democracy

I6

Working on [building settler solidarity with] Six Nations…[it] was very interesting...and inspiring to see Six Nations, which is this Indigenous group that has the oldest surviving democratic constitution in the world, who have been actively fighting colonialism for five hundred years, who have retained a great deal of their culture in the face of genocide, and still works by those sorts of principles that we were trying to discover in 2001. Things like consensus, broad deep forms of respect, broad forms of solidarity and affinity. They have methods for cultivating those that have lasted for literally thousands of years. So seeing that in action and also seeing what the state does in the face of that and how they try and divide and conquer was very inspirational and changed my thinking a great deal.

Precarity and inertia

I9

I think...one of the most present problems right now is...how precarious everything is around us in terms of our living spaces, we have no control over [them], we...pay all this rent [and] it's just burned off….The places we work, we have no control over the vast majority of them so that we're just thrust around here and there. We're fired with no notice, we have to deal with all kinds of unfair working conditions depending on the whim of the employers and this creates a lot of problems for everyone. We're stressed out, we're just left with no energy and time at the end of the day other than to watch TV or zone out or whatever.

Climate crisis and fascism

I3

From what I can tell the environmental changes that we're going through at a global scale are really concretely affecting a lot of people and the way that they can survive. Especially people who live or are more directly dependent [on] direct production [on] the land,….people who live in areas where climate already generates conditions of precarity, and that's exacerbated and we can see shifts [in] accessibility [of] resources, [of] food, already happening. I fear that those who have access right now will increasingly follow a trend...towards fascism in terms of claiming and enclosing access, in very rigid and violent ways, excluding [others from being able to] access...resources and food.

Bunker mentalities

I24

I'm always quite surprised at the number of people that agree with you when you talk about how the system is not serving our interests and isn't really meeting the needs that we need to be met. I don't think that's the problem among the masses of people, I think the problem is that nobody is able to give them any direction to do anything about it. So people have this sort of bunker mentality, I look after myself, I'll do what I can for me and my family.

Activism and marginality

I9

Just looking at our immediate context right here in Halifax...looking at...the organizations that people have to fight through right now, the only ones that we see around us are these unions that right now are pretty backwards….[T]hey don't really fight anything except legal strikes which are almost nothing these days, small windows, pickets that aren't really challenging the company. I think for me it matters who is showing up, who are the people that are involving themselves and I'm seeing the activist community, a loose knit group of people involved in different NGOs in the city, people involved in student activism, that are showing up at all these different events but these aren't the actual body of workers that are out there. This isn't like a working class movement and if it's not a working class movement it doesn't really have the potential to transform conditions in our society.

Beginning with the basics

I11

I like Food not Bombs because I think that having food and...sharing food is... one of the most...basic things. If we can do that then we can do everything else...or we can work towards doing everything else for ourselves too.

Doing it ourselves

I26

We've already been compromised and co-opted…[b]ut out of that…I think movements will continue to grow. Underground movements, grassroots movements...there was a woman I spoke to a few weeks ago, she's from San Francisco, where a huge grassroots midwifery movement took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s and...she said, ‘what do you do when women just start catching each other's babies and no one has titles, and no one has credentials, and no one has equipment, but yet that's what women want, and babies are well, and women are well, what if we just caught each other's babies?’ What would that look like? What message would that give?